Today the Puget Sound Leadership Council — the group of prominent citizens appointed by Gov. Christine Gregoire to guide the Sound’s restoration by a 2020 deadline — holds its first meeting where the public is invited. (Inauspiciously, its first meeting was held in secret so the council members could interview candidates for executive director of the new agency.)

On the eve of this meeting, Washington’s top enviro-regulator paid a visit to the P-I’s editorial board, saying that he doesn’t believe the public is ready yet for steps that experts say would control one of the fastest-growing threats to the Sound — stormwater.

Jay Manning

Jay Manning, head of the state Ecology Department and a key player in jumpstarting the renewed push to restore the Sound, told the editorial writers and yours truly that he feels it’s too early to mandate Low Impact Development. Recall that the most vociferous criticism of the state’s Puget Sound restoration campaign came from scientists who said, in essence, that its approach to stormwater just will not get the job done.

Why not mandate LID? Because, said Manning, there would be too much pushback from developers:

We’ll do it when in our judgment and the Legislature’s judgment, it’s ripe. … I think there’s an education process that needs to happen. . . that is deeper and wider than it is now.

To which the Dateline Earth team says: Not because of lack of effort on our part. (Also look here.)

Manning went on to allow that we do need “a very big change in the way we build,” adding:

It’s dangerous for government to mandate something that society is not ready for, but government has to lead.

Manning started off the conversation by saying he’s been in government for 17 of the 25 years of his career, and while we don’t doubt that his heart’s in the right place, we have to say that that quote shows he has developed the politician’s knack for saying something his audience wants to hear.

In the next year the Leadership Council will develop an “action agenda,” and Manning said:

That’s where this question is going to be debated: Is it time to mandate Low Impact Development?

Today’s all-day meeting is being held at the Bell Harbor Conference Center on the waterfront in Seattle.